Today I read an very interesting news item , which is about human and computer.
IBM fell short in their latest attempt to say that machines are far superior to man, but their try was very close. IBM’s six year old artificial intelligence system for debate, popularly known as ‘Miss Debater’ or AI-IBM’s debating machine, went head to head with one of the world’s best debater Harish Natarajan on 11th Feb 2019. This event took place in front of hundreds of journalists, technical industries (IBM) top executives at IBM’s Think conference in San Francisco and the topic was “ We should subsidised Preschools”.
This debating system was developed by Noam Slonim and his team. He was personally present during this debate and was occupying front row seat, and he commented “ it is like watching your child is on the stage competing against a world class pianist and whole world is watching”. Unlike chess, debating requires connecting with people and in the end you have to convince them of your viewpoint. The biggest plus point any human holds over the machine is that, a person’s ability to deliver speech with emotions, wielding tone, pitch and pauses to turn/sway the audience.
Noam Slonim thought about this idea of developing Project Debater. He and his team started studying the way humans learn the art of debate, and built a system to mirror that process. Their machine scans more than 300 million newspaper articles and technical/scientific journals to identify the relevant arguments on any topic. It then has to determine which facts and options are for or against, build a speech and deliver it cohesively. What’s more, the AI Debater then has to comprehend the opponent’s argument and craft a rebuttal reply.
This unorthodox contest marked the latest in man v/c machine battle. The last known battle of this kind was when Computer played against Chess Grandmaster, initially first time man won but then in 1996 machine emerged victorious. But the art of debating requires more creativity and emotive elocution, hence developing computer to the debating was a really challenging task for the team.
During the event on Monday 11th Feb, both the contestants were given the topic at the same time and had 15 minutes of time to prepare for the debate, with 4 minutes for speech, 4 minutes for rebuttal and finally 2 minutes for summary. During the first 15 minutes Project Debater’s big black box remained silent except for three rotating blue circles as it mulled over 10 billion sentences from scientific journals and news articles. Facing the machine on stage Harish Natarajan scrawled notes on a piece of paper. Both AI Debater and Natarajan argued in their allotted time, and at the end of their debate, audience were asked to vote. In the end Natarajan was declared winner. Among the audience, IBM’s CEO Ginni Rometty was also present and surprisingly he also voted for Natarajan, and commented the AI enriched their knowledge. Although AI lost the contest, the event was culmination of sorts for Noam Slonim and his team.
Slonim further added that AI Debater still needs some further work. He and his research team are exploring whether AI can help expand the human mind. For instance, AI in future can help lawyers pore through thousands court cases to determine how they can present their arguments in the court before the judge. In the end Slonim said ‘ Think about it. We rarely see a machine having intelligent discussions with human for full 25 minutes.’
Harish Natarajan, who holds the record for winning the most debate competitions and was a grand finalist in World Debating Championship in 2016. All his previous wins were against fellow human beings, but this time Hats Off to him, as he has emerged victorious against a machine.
I am not sure , where our future will lead us, one thing is sure, man will be always winner against machine, as machine has not made a man but man has made a machine.
What you say my friends.
Awaiting your views/comments/feed backs.
Anil Malik
Mumbai, India
13th Feb 2019.